Olive oil has been an important food source,lamp fuel, religious material, cosmetic, and medicine for thousands of years.
橄榄不只是沙拉配料,它与小麦和葡萄一起成为地中海的核心食物。在现代,它作为一种健康食品和DIY食材受到了一波又一波的欢迎。
This ancient food has also come under necessary modern scrutiny, however. Olive oil is a huge business, and where there’s money to be made, there are always scams to be played. It’s suspected that around80% of olive oil sold in stores is tainted, purposely mislabeled, or adulterated with cheaper, lesser-quality corn or vegetable oils.
Cheaper olive oils are often extracted using chemical means — these “oils” are often labeled “pomace,” indicating they were extracted from the leftover olive solids from earlier pressings. Consuming these means you’ll be ingestingsome sort of chemical solvent. If you domore digging, you can try finding olive oil companies that are trustworthy, but you’ll still have to take someone else’s word for it.
我的建议?跳过营销。跳过中间人。避免长时间的运输、氧化、包装和浪费。要知道你拥有的是最健康、最纯净的橄榄油,以及它的食用方式,唯一的方法就是学习如何自己制作橄榄油。
Now, pressing your own oil from a crop of perfectly ripe, fresh-picked olives may seem like some sort of unattainable, provincial fantasy, but it is as possible in the home kitchen as it was for Mediterranean peasants thousands of years ago. If you are blessed enough to have access to olive trees, or if you have the space to cultivate your own, you too can take part in the ancient tradition of harvesting oil from olives.
Related Post:Homemade Vinegar
Though there are certainly nuances to it, pressing oil is a surprisingly simple process. People the world over have done it without electricity and big machines, so rest assured that with minimal tools, you’ll be able to do it too. With that all said, read on to learn how to make olive oil at home.
Ingredients
I love simplicity, and the ingredient list for homemade extra virgin olive oil (which essentially meansmade without chemicals) couldn’t be more beautiful.
- Clean water
- Fresh, raw, ripe olives
Of course, the type and freshness of olives, and the nuances of finding the perfect balance of flavors, is what adds the underlying millennia of history to this seemingly simple, bitter fruit.
当你学习如何制作橄榄油的时候,有几十种橄榄品种可以试验。如果你自己种植,你会得到最个性化、最独特的橄榄油,用你土地上的阳光和风来调味。如果你在市场上购买新鲜橄榄,可以试试卡拉马塔橄榄。
If you’re harvesting your own olives, you can try pressing oil from them at different stages of ripeness and find the flavor you like best. For starters, you can try green olives — before they start to go on the color shift to red and black. Any size can be used.
If you don’t have access to fresh olives, canned olives are an unsuitable replacement. It won’t taste the same, and the oil is likely to spoil.
There are a couple of different ways to make olive oil at home: small scale and traditional. We’re going to cover how to make olive oil with both of these methods.
How to Make Olive Oil: Small-Scale Process
There are many different ways to extract oil, but I’ll start witha very simple onethat uses tools you probably have on hand. It is a bit time consuming, but this labor of love will certainly be worth it in the end when you pour and taste that first, verdant-green dish of homemade olive oil (in a special bowl, of course).
这种方法不需要榨油机,所以这是一个很好的小规模实验,也是一种学习如何制作橄榄油的可行方法。If you fall in love with making your own oil (and have a reliable source of suitable olives), then I would think it would be more than worth it totake the plunge and buy that expensive(but worth it!) piece of equipment.
Supplies
- Paring knife or olive pitting tool
- 搅拌机(或浸泡式搅拌机和容器)
- Cheesecloth
- Bowl
- Tall, clear glass bottle
Process
- 清洗2磅橄榄,确保去除所有污垢,树枝和树叶。
- Painstakingly pit each olive.
- Place pitted olives in a blender to render into chunks.
- 向搅拌器中加入半杯温水,然后高速搅拌大约10分钟,直到形成非常细的橄榄酱。这时,你会看到酱汁上面有漂亮的天鹅绒般的光泽因为油开始从糊状物中分离。
- 将糊状物转移到一个盖着芝士布的碗里,然后把芝士布紧紧地捆起来,尽可能多地压出液体。真的挤!节约每一滴水。
- Pour the liquid into a taller, narrow glass and allow it to settle. Oil and water don’t mix, right?
- After a few hours, right before your eyes, the watery solids will separate from the beautiful oil, which will rise to the top.
- 小心倒入黑色玻璃杯(或直接倒入前面提到的特殊碗),享受世界上最新鲜、最纯净的橄榄油。
Don’t worry about the clarity of your slightly opaque oil — that delightfully rustic trait is something that can’t be purchased.
How to Make Olive Oil: Traditional Method
I found a traditional write-up of the oil extraction process in a delightful, hard-to-find book calledHandmadeby Drew and Louise Langsner. The instructions were taken from the mouths of herders and farmers who were still living traditionally on the Balkan Peninsula. If you want to learn how to make olive oil the traditional way, keep reading!
Supplies
- Wooden tub (food grade)
- Screw press
- Tall, clear glass bottle
Process
- Pick your olives while they are green, and before they turn reddish and begin to blacken. This works best in a team of two, with one person climbing the olive tree and loosening the olives, and another under the tree gathering them onto a sheet.
- 把橄榄带回家,放在一个木桶里。
- Cover the olives with fresh room temperature water to leach out tannins.
- The water will turn dark brown: In 2 to 3 hours, drain the water and replace.
- Replace water daily for 5 to 7 days until rinse water pours off clear (olives will taste very bland)
- Now, drain thoroughly and put olives through a screw-press (similar to an apple cider press)
- 坑和矿浆会被过滤出来,优质的油会分离并浮到顶部。
- 小心倒入容器中使用。
Want to get a glimpse of what it looks like inside a traditional olive oil mill in Italy? Check out this video from “Business Insider” that shows how some of the highest quality olive oil in the world is made.
Storage and Pomace Use
新鲜的橄榄油应该在压榨后的两年内使用(我希望你不要等那么久才使用)。为了保持新鲜,把橄榄油储存在深色的罐子里,避免阳光照射。
Now, all that olive pomace (the leftover solids) shouldn’t go to waste. I have been able to findsome informationon how farmers in the Mediterranean give it to ruminants as a feed supplement, but if you’re unsure whether your goats and sheep could handle it, you can always compost it instead. Chickens, on the other hand, have had favorable growth afterhaving pomace included in the diet.
如果你有机会获得新鲜的橄榄,学习如何制作橄榄油很容易成为你自给自足的另一个工具。希望您现在看到这个过程是多么简单。如果你有自己制作橄榄油的经验,请在下面的评论中分享你的制作过程和技巧。看看这篇文章,让我们知道你是否成功地学会了如何制作橄榄油。
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